YouTube’s paid membership tier today adds five more features that it hopes will differentiate it enough from the free tier to charge you every month.
YouTube Premium subscribers can now use a queuing system on phones and tablets, which was previously in testing until the end of January. This is available for all computers when using the YouTube website, but mobile app functionality is limited to subscribers. As the name suggests, this lets you create a queue of videos to play, add new ones, and change positions for existing ones.
After that, Premium members can host Google Meet sessions where all attendees, whether they are Premium or Free users, can watch YouTube videos together. This is currently live via Meet Live Sharing on Android devices and will be enabled “in the coming weeks” for FaceTime users on iOS via SharePlay.
The third new feature is the ability to continue watching YouTube videos where you left off, even if you’ve switched devices. This is now available on Android, iOS and the web.
The fourth new feature, Smart Downloads, now adds recommended videos directly to your library, ready for offline viewing. This should help if you’ve forgotten to download some stuff for your next flight, for example, though it’s unclear exactly what’s new here, as it’s been available to Premium members for a while now.
Finally, “in the coming weeks”, for Premium members, YouTube on iOS will provide an improved bitrate version for 1080p HD resolution video (this was detected during testing in February). The company promises that this bitrate-upped version “will look sharper and clearer, especially for videos with lots of detail and motion,” though 1080p HD resolution will still be available to everyone, just not at this higher bitrate.
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